Emails From Steve Jobs.com reader Andreas Dantz was kind enough to write in about a recent email he received from Steve.

With the removal of any physical media installation method for Lion, Andreas wondered how a clean installation would work if he bought a new hard drive. Would he need to first install Snow Leopard and then upgrade Lion on top of that? Or would there perhaps be an alternative to this?

Andreas wrote:

Dear Mr. Jobs,

I just wanted to know if there will be a way to install Lion on a new HDD/SSD without previously installing 10.6?

Regards,

Andreas Dantz

Steve’s straightforward reply:

Sorry, no.

Sent from my iPhone

So just in case you thought there may be an alternative physical media installation method. Sorry, no, Apple was serious when they said that Lion would only be available through the App Store. This is pretty interesting since it means that Steve must have sat through the meetings where they discussed the implications of this move to a download only upgrade.

4 Comments

How about installing it on ssd as external hd first then do the swap after installation?

Nav / Jun 22 2011

I burned the image of the Lion DP 4 to a DVD. I then booted from that DVD, erased my 2 partition hard drive, installed Lion DP 4, then used Migration Assistant to pull over all my files from a previous Time Machine Snow Leopard backup. Everything worked swimmingly.

Mick Russom / Jul 22 2011

Power crazy loon.

user experience is starting to go into the toilet, especially for power users.